


Kalendae.

by orange_crushed



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-11
Updated: 2013-04-11
Packaged: 2017-12-05 00:09:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 21,453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/716624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orange_crushed/pseuds/orange_crushed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He wonders who would have taken the time to program independent reactions of this sophistication. So he asks her. She looks at him and then looks down at her feet, and says it's a good thing his shoes didn't leave a scuff on hers, because she's not sure it would ever come out. So apparently, his autopilot is a complex hard-light simulacrum with high-security topics that are code-designated as strictly off-limit, or his autopilot simply has things she'd prefer not to discuss. </p><p>He wonders at that, too.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

I.

He shouldn't be doing this. It's the definition of folly. There is a quantum philosophy examination in three days, and after that, a council meeting at which there is very probably going to be a lengthy argument about the university's current policies on genetic memory enhancements. All of which will require his complete attention. The nonexistent remainder of his attention is supposed to be devoted to the problem of Susan.

"She's not a _problem_ ," her mother had insisted. He'd sighed and said something under his breath about human growth rates and cognitive capacities and she'd said, quite firmly, "She's not exactly human, either, is she?" He is forced to admit that is true. She is not entirely human. Which is not the problem. The problem is, she is also not entirely Gallifreyan. There is no future seat on the university boards for a half-human born by traditional means. No matter how quick she is, no matter how fast she learns and how bright her eyes, how swiftly she solves every puzzle put before her, how crystalline her laughter when he used to swing her in his arms. Susan is a problem. His problem, from now on. He was the one who instigated the whole thing, directing her mother's passion for xenomorphology, encouraging her fieldwork, letting her run wild in all manner of centuries. And now he is no better than she is, sneaking through the back hallways of the renewal yards, poking at the shattered doors of old models and wandering down all manner of ill-advised mental pathways. He hasn't been approved for travel- quite the opposite- but perhaps they'll consider it, if he explains. If he explains Susan, Susan's questions, Susan's boundless intelligence and her habit of looking up at the stars. It's a habit he thought he was broken of, long ago, but now he finds they look up together more often than not.

"Are you lost?" says a voice just behind him, breaking his reveries and scattering the constellations away. He turns and finds the renewal yard matron looking at him with a mix of wariness and compassionate concern. Of course, he looks like a lunatic or a thief, poking into broken ships and hm-ing to himself, here alone in the dark. "Or looking for one in particular?"

"Just curious," he manages. He straightens his crooked robes. "I've visited the nurseries already. But I was interested in full machines. These are primarily damaged mid-period models, are they not?" She nods. "I have a certain fascination with the production specifications of the, er, early TARDIS," he adds, trying to sound serious and respectable and not like the madman he's becoming. She smiles at him.

"So do I," she says. "You know, the central archive has a particularly fine historic piece. Retrieved from the Eye, in fact. Decommissioned, a bit banged about, but still in my mind one of the superior designs."

"Do they?" He tries not to sound too interested.

"A type 40," she tells him. "Blue."

"Oh," he says.

 

 

It is laughably easy to pass through the security checkpoints. Algorithmic dual-matrix code entry panels? Primed biometric scanners with easily duped delay patterns? There were better deterrents on the door to his father's study when he was a boy. Apparently the archives are actually filled with useless things that nobody's concerned about, or they just can't imagine a world where unhinged quantum probability professors break into museums at night.

He finds it on a plinth in the middle of a hallway, halfway between a propagandistic biographical display on Rassilon and pieces of an early loom. The holo-plaque tells him nothing of interest, except that the chameleon circuit seems to have been permanently disabled. Not as useful as he might have liked, then. Difficult to go through time and space that way. It's an odd thing, this TARDIS, stuck looking like a great big rectangular box. A wooden box, no less. A police box, Earth-origin, mid-twentieth century. Well, at least they'd have little trouble visiting among that particular set of humanoids. He is mulling over the many limitations of a broken chameleon mechanism when, quite unconsciously, he reaches out and rests a hand on the door frame. It feels like wood, remarkably like it. The door is weathered, worn smooth in certain places where a hand might pause as one brushed through. There is a curious sensation in the back of his mind- a calming hum, one placid thread of consciousness pricking his own, a faint waking ripple- like wind through a keyhole. He is aware that the TARDIS, like all such ships, is a sentient being, but he did not expect it to be quite so- alive. He holds onto the door and thinks, suddenly, of the great dark sky above them, whirling above and around at all times. The sky is full of galaxies and the galaxies are full of stars and the stars are courted by planets each in turn, twirling slowly on their axis. Without thinking, he climbs up onto the plinth and reaches over the door frame. His hand skims the top and finds an indentation, and in that indentation, a key. He cups it in his hands and stares down at it. The hum in his mind pauses, then comes back, warmer and more insistent. He blinks. 

"Ah," he says. "Hello."

He unlocks the door.

It's dark inside, but for a few indicator lights still clinging to life on the console. A spare, simple design, with recharging bio-cells lining the walls and a glassed-in central column. He primes a few switches and the interior start to glow, dimly. It's a multi-pilot console, but easily managed by one or two. Nothing like the later comfort models with their broad command panels, built for accommodating crews of nine or ten for long off-planet missions, back when they still had an interest in keeping their hand in galactic politics. He reads the dials- barely enough power yet to switch districts, let alone centuries, but rising fast- and he's leaning in to regulate the matter transfer when someone clears their throat. Quite close. He jerks upright and stares over the console at her. It's a girl. Two arms, two legs, blonde, young. Pretty eyes. Inappropriately dressed. Probably the fashion outside the capitol, like the strange haircuts Susan is lately admiring on the holo-screen. This one's older than Susan, but gods, everyone looks too young to him these days. She's smiling now, hands behind her back, rocking a little on her heels. Waiting. "Excuse me, cadet," he snaps. "If you're looking to examine an antique TARDIS, this one's taken." Her grin widens. "I am conducting sensitive research. Begone."

"You'll want to set the cell reflux cycle a nudge higher," she says. "Or you'll still be sitting here in the morning when the archivists come back." He gapes at her. "Well, go on." He looks down at the panel. And flicks the level up several notches. "Much better," she says.

"Explain yourself," he demands.

"I'm not the one stealing a type 40, am I?"

"How dare-"

"I am your Relief Operational Sentient Entity," she interrupts, with a disarming little half-curtsy. "The pleasure's all mine."

"You're-" his brain trails sluggishly for an infuriating moment, then slams abruptly into the only obvious answer. Didn't he study the schematics of the type 40 for three hours last night? He ought to be an expert by now, but it appears not. "Autopilot," he says. "You're the autopilot." Of course. Though she seems nothing like the typical autopilots he's studied. Most autopilots are programmed versions of the operator, or intimidating authoritative types, useful for defensive scenarios. Naturally he's been saddled with somebody else's idea of a- what's the word for it? Some kind of- holiday companion. A pretty sight to look at in the boring stretches of space. A needless thing. He'll figure out how to reprogram it. "I won't be requiring your services," he tells her. "I am fully capable of operating this vessel independently. Deactivate," he says, waving his hand in her general direction. The autopilot stares at him, then folds her arms over her chest. "Deactivate," he repeats. Nothing happens. "Am I to assume," he says, carefully, "that the autopilot shutoff switch is broken as well?" 

"No," she says. "You just need to ask politely."

"Insufferable!" he says. He glowers at her. "Please, then. Please would you do me the kindness of deactivating and removing yourself from my sight."

"Suit yourself," she sighs, and blinks away. He most definitely does not concern himself with the look of hurt that flashed across her features. A useless affectation in a programmed intelligence. One that displeases him for its sheer ridiculousness. He wonders if he can find out which particular hormonal idiot owned this model before him, and if they're still available for a sound kicking. He forgets that thought- and every other thought, briefly- when he finally flips the lever and the ship grinds back to life in a joyous symphony of sparks. They took him to the schism when he was a boy. They take everyone. But he remembers that old sound, faintly, as he hears it again now. The sound of the universe opening. He closes his eyes. He's taught probabilities and the mechanics of time for so long, but never understood. Not really. He didn't realize, until this very moment, that everything is a beginning.

 

 

He doesn't think of the autopilot once, not once, in the weeks that follow. Not until he walks into the console room and finds Susan and the autopilot sitting cross-legged on the floor, laughing uproariously at some private joke, hands over their mouths and tears in their eyes. Can autopilots generate simulated tears? Again, he's filled with seething irritation for the brainless dolt who designed this one to begin with. 

"Deactivate!" he practically roars. It scowls and flashes away without a protest, but Susan turns on him with genuine anger plain in her face. He's baffled before it. Such a good girl, his Susan. Such a sweet, devoted girl. 

"Grandfather," she says. Her dark eyes are storms of hurt. "That's no way to talk to Rose."

"To _Rose_?" His brain puts the acronym into place. "Oh, for goodness' sake. She's not- it's not a person, Susan. It's a program. A particularly silly one."

"Don't be horrible," says Susan. He throws his hands up and parks them in fourth-century Iowa and takes a very, very long walk across a very, very cold field. By the time he comes back, Susan is in her own room, talking in low tones behind a closed door. He can guess with whom. He chooses to ignore it, and takes them to Majorca Minor, in time for their lunar festival. Susan is marginally placated by the purchase of several pies. When it is finally late and Susan is yawning, he kisses her on the forehead and sends her off to her room. "Goodnight," she yawns. "Don't forget what I said," she adds, with a last, stubborn look over her shoulder. In case he was in any doubt as to just whose daughter she really is. He putters around the console and pretends to check the levels and finally just sits in a chair and sighs and thinks about a time when he was a respected educator and a member of several distinguished bodies and not a semi-fugitive beholden to the whims of half-human teenage girls. He glances up and around.

"As you like it, then," he says, irritably. "Rose."

The lights flicker a bit.

 

 

Little by little, he begins to forget that the autopilot offends him on principle. The truth is, it knows more about the ship's workings than he does, just yet. He stole the manual as well, naturally, but it's written entirely in highly personal-sounding hypotheticals. One occasionally needs to be told more than which lever to push in case of historical poisonings by the League of Assassins. It's just such an occasion when they have landed firmly into the sinking time-swamp of Pustlunath and they're eager to get out again, that he finds himself bent over the console panel arguing loudly with the autopilot about which gear setting can escape motion-sensitive fourth-dimensional swamp suction. 

"This one," Rose says. "Don't be such a stubborn-"

"Perhaps our situation has escaped you," he snaps. "But the only possible course-"

"Escaped?" The autopilot actually laughs at him. "Doctor, nobody's escaping anything if you don't adjust for angle of ascent." He mutters several unprintable things and does exactly as she says, then punches the coordinates in a bit harder than necessary. The TARDIS rocks and shudders and Ian holds onto the girls and the console sparks and the whole thing's a great big spectacular mess until it suddenly isn't, and they're free and orbiting the low atmosphere at a comfortable distance. He mutters some more, and rockets them onward, hopefully to France this time. Rose clears her throat.

"Yes," he says. "Yes, yes." The insolent strand of coding. She smiles and winks at Susan and vanishes, and Ian and Barbara look at each other queasily over the console. Some time later- one thoroughly dispiriting revolution later, actually- he finds himself alone in the room with Barbara, still dressed in a rather fetching period gown. She makes small talk about Robespierre and the inefficient methods of revolutionary policing, while he pretends to listen. And at last she asks a strange question, one that he asks her to repeat.

"Did you program her?"

"I most certainly did not," he says, dismissively. Barbara looks offended by his tone. Well, he's offended by the question. Who could even consider it? To think that he'd program his autopilot to look like a twenty-year-old girl in a denim skirt with dark makeup around her eyes. One that's always biting at her lip and second-guessing his theories about particle acceleration. Great gods of dark space. Spare him the indignities. "I've merely had some difficulties in altering the visual output. The appearance is hardly meaningful, besides. What matters is that the TARDIS auto-functions continue to operate in a standard fashion."

"Of course," Barbara says. Is she smiling at him? Honestly. He ought to dump them all out over the churning Green Sea of Hock'noor, and see who smiles afterwards. 

"Grandfather," says Susan, coming in from the hallway. "Barbara. We've rummaged a bit for tea. I don't know about you, but I could stand a strong cup and a long nap." She's still in a gown as well, her hair gone wild and her arms a bit dirty. She's so very beautiful. She looks more like her mother now than she ever has before, and he feels a great sharp pang in his heart at that thought. This one's growing up, he thinks, without wanting to. Grown up entirely, perhaps, when he wasn't looking, like the first shoots of spring. She comes to him and takes him by the sleeve, rests her hand over his arm. "Does that sound all right?"

"Delightful," he says. He lets her lead him away. 

 

 

This was what he wanted, wasn't it? It was all for this, for her. He meant every word he said, every promise he made. She'll be so much better like this, without him. Better and stronger. Full of love and hope for the future. Free. Susan was meant for this, all her courage and her kindness will have places to land. A whole world to change, without university boards and ancient custom holding her back. And David to stand at her side. He is as sure of the decision to leave her as he was when he pushed the lever that first, exhilarating night of theft and escape. And for all that, he is still standing with his hand pressed against the wooden door, stuck there like a statue, his hearts giving up great heaving shudders in his chest like he's just run a mile. They are in different parts of the galaxy now, different times. Hundreds of years and millions of miles. He ought to know, he set the coordinates, not that it's usually much good. He knows consciously that if he opens the doors, Susan will not be standing on the other side of them any longer. But it doesn't matter. He can't quite bring himself to let go.

He is so painfully aware of his solitude that for a long moment, his mind doesn't register the slight shift in the room, the awareness of presence at the edge of his senses, like the distant drone of bees. Ian and Barbara have gone away, drifted off to their rooms, to give him a bit of privacy, they said. So he knows it isn't them standing behind him. He doesn't want to see her. Not now. Don't autopilots have to be flipped on and off like a switch? Why does his always come knocking loudest when he wants it least? Perhaps if he stands perfectly still, it will cycle off and disappear. What a foolish thought. It's like a children's game, really, him standing against the door with his eyes closed, willing her to be gone before he can turn around. She isn't. She is still there, looking like flesh and blood in her own uncanny way. She looks alive, and hurting. And there they are again, those uncanny tears.

"I'm sorry," says Rose. That makes him want to howl. She can't be sorry, nothing made of autopilot command keys and code sequences can be sorry. He wants to tell her so. But he thinks of Susan laughing with her, and he can't summon up the cruelty to say anything much at all.

"Leave me," he tells her, finally. He means it to sound commanding, but it doesn't. It sounds old, and sad, and frail. It sounds just the way he feels. "Leave me," he says. "Go." He looks away. It's impossible, that he should still feel her eyes upon him- they are not eyes at all, but hard light projections, empty illusions, holographic manipulation- but he does. She stares at him for a long minute before she vanishes.

And then he's alone.

 

II.

He finds out entirely by accident that she is not quite a hologram. Not precisely. Holograms, strictly speaking, do not have dimensional mass, even for a millisecond. One cannot- for example- accidentally step on a hologram's foot and feel for a brief instant one's own sole landing quite hard on a completely occupied tennis shoe. And then melting through it as through a cloud, because there is nothing really there at all, until your foot looks as if it has been hopelessly mangled up with hers by occupying the same space. This is not one of the scenarios covered in the increasingly abstract pages of the TARDIS manual, but it happens all the same. They are reaching for the single inertial dampening lever, but she gets there first, by virtue of being able to disappear and reappear three feet closer inside of a half-second. The moment after his foot crushes hers virtually into the flooring, he looks up into her face- infuriatingly, this new body is shorter than the last one, and feels shorter than half the people he meets these days- and pure shock must be written on his features, because his autopilot lets out a high-pitched giggle instead of a yelp.

"Did that-" he pauses at the magnitude of it. "Did that hurt?"

"No," she says. Rose discreetly slides her foot away from his, ending their strange dissolution, and switches the inertial compensation matrix up a notch. "I didn't feel a thing."

"Do you ever?"

She appears to think about that.

"Not really."

"May I?" he asks, suddenly curious. He holds out a hand to her, and she trustingly puts her own in it. He marvels at the feel of that hand- at first solid and smooth, soft flesh over bone, a little warm to the touch, but slightly cooler than human or Gallifreyan skin. There are fine hairs on the back of it, and on the top of her arm, and a tiny mole on one knuckle. But after a second, she seems to phase out of contact, and his hand passes through hers as through air. Life almost perfectly imitated. He's never seen such a thing. How was this accomplished? Perhaps her designer was less idiot after all, and more savant. He presses the thickest part of her palm between his forefinger and thumb. "Anything?" 

"No."

"Fascinating." She pulls her hand away straight through his arm, and he is further amazed to see her blush a little. He wonders who would have taken the time to program independent reactions of this sophistication. So he asks her. She looks at him and then looks down at her feet, and says it's a good thing his shoes didn't leave a scuff on hers, because she's not sure it would ever come out. So apparently, his autopilot is a complex hard-light simulacrum with high-security topics that are code-designated as strictly off-limit, or his autopilot simply has things she'd prefer not to discuss. 

He wonders at that, too. 

 

 

When they take his ship away- and Jamie, and Zoe, and everything- he is afraid for a moment that they will wipe it clean, scour the memory banks. They can do that. He knows. The great council is already changing his face. He's at their mercy. They could easily scrub away all the years of travel, all the special settings and work-arounds and little tricks he's gathered. He wonders if his ship would remember him. And they could take- the rest, too. He doesn't dare think the name, not even the acronym, in case they're listening in especially closely, the overbearing, exile-happy fools. He tells himself it would be a terrible inconvenience, having to program it all over again. Really much better to keep it. Just as it is. "The secret of the TARDIS will be taken from you," they tell him, and he feels a little thrill of triumph, even here in the widening jaws of defeat. 

Because the TARDIS has more than one secret, after all.

 

III.

"Welcome back," is all she says, after he finally remembers how to reverse their dematerialization dampening field, and unlocks the navigational matrix. She is of course part of the navigational matrix, part of the things he couldn't use and couldn't even recall, and so the minute he flips the switch and reboots the backups, she is suddenly sitting on the edge of the console with her legs crossed and a great big grin on her face. He doesn't remember her at first. They took an awful lot, the arrogant sods. But it comes back in a minute, along with the easiest way to collapse a transdimensional warp pocket, and the last place he parked on Tauros Minor. "And just in time, too. Thought I was going to spend eternity in there, reciting the coordinate codes backwards and forwards to keep from going spare."

"You might have had a little faith," he snaps. "Now make yourself useful, and hold down the acceleration key until I tell you."

He ignores the sarcastic salute.

 

 

Stowaways are not featured in _any_ section of the manual. 

"You've kidnapped those scientists, and you've got this- this girl captive, too!" Sarah Jane Not Actually Lavinia Smith- he's just remembering her real name, now, after a burst of shouting- backs into the console, then puts her fists up. She's absolutely steely-eyed, and against his own irritation he feels a spark of interest. Clever and brave and curious, aren't they always? Some more so than others. "What have you done with Professor Rubeish?" He rolls his eyes to the ceiling.

"For the last time-"

"Rubbish," says Rose. 

"Rubeish," corrects Sarah Jane. 

"No, I mean-" Rose looks like she's about to shout more or crack up laughing. "This one couldn't keep jam in a jar with both hands." He gives her a look of withering scorn that comes straight from his bruised ego, but obviously she doesn't catch it. Probably just as well. It might have tipped her firmly into laughter.

"Enough!" the Doctor snaps, but nobody's listening anymore. Sarah Jane and Rose stand toe-to-toe.

"His co-conspirator, then," Sarah Jane suggests. Rose's eyes flash with anger, and he wonders if he is ever going to get a word in edgewise.

"There are no conspiracies aboard this ship!" he cries out, and they both stare at him. "I have not kidnapped any scientists, good heavens. The Professor is not here. And she is not my co-anything," he adds, haughtily. "She's- it's just my autopilot." Rose's glare now narrows back on him. The things he endures for UNIT. For the universe. "I'd like you both to remember that there is a highly dangerous individual on the loose with a matter transmitter and an enormous suit of medieval armor."

"So," says Sarah Jane, a little huffily. Winding down, but still looking for soft places to strike. "You keep a girl in a box to do the driving." And then there is another argument, more rapid than the first, and he keeps out of it entirely. He steers them as best he can. By the time they land, they have all worked out a fairly solid plan in which he and Sarah Jane go out for reconnaissance while Rose traces the matter transmission signal and locks onto the coordinates. It very nearly works, but of course, that's the middle ages for you. Running for it and ending up in a pile of leaves is really not the worst possible ending to a Tuesday. When they return, Rose is waiting, with a look of delighted relief. He leaves for one minute- merely to replace his soiled cravat- and finds both of them now shoulder to shoulder, Rose raptly attentive to the story of their escape.

"You didn't," Rose is saying. "Sleeping potion? You dumped the whole thing in?"

"I had to draw their attention off," Sarah Jane says. Her grin cracks and she starts to giggle. "You'll never believe- I just pointed," Sarah Jane wheezes, laughter coming now in great wrenching bursts, "and yelled, _look at that massive spider_!" They sit cackling on the edge of the console, slapping the tops of their thighs. "I've seen it in films, but I never thought- never thought it'd actually work!"

"Bonkers," says Rose. "But brilliant." He clears his throat, and they both look up.

"Miss Smith," he says. "I'm obliged to you for your help. A very brave thing you did- several brave things in succession, really," he adds. "And I'm sure you'd like to be on your way home by now. Rose, would you be so kind as to set our coordinates?" She looks at him, and at Sarah Jane, and a slight smile crosses her face. Well, it's no surprise, really. She's done this before. She likes the ones that talk back best. He might admit to the same bias, if he was an admitting sort of man.

"Could do," Rose grins. "Home. Or, if you like-"

 

IV.

He is really very sorry about Sarah Jane, but it was impossible. There's no way around it, bringing a human home to Gallifrey. Forbidden. Not allowed. He's hardly keen on the rules, but that's why they're rules, aren't they? Nobody forbids you to do the things you've no inclination to do in the first place. That'd be ridiculous. He misses her- the ship is quiet, the hallways empty- but there's been a Call, and a Call is a serious thing. Rose isn't a timelord, and Rose feels that most rules can go hang, and Rose says that so can he for all she cares, and Rose does not materialize again for months and months, during which time he is nearly clubbed to death by an old friend and later forced to shoot a giant rat in the most horrendous sewer. 

He can still see an invisible hand moving dials every so often, compensating for his more egregious steering errors, but he doesn't mention that out loud. Romana doesn't like it- Romana feels it's unbecoming to allow one's programmed autopilot to take such liberties with the navigation, except in times of emergency- but then, dear lovely Romana used to begin so many of her sentences with "On _Gallifrey_ -" 

At least they are all united in their hatred of the randomiser. 

 

V.

"You're pretty this time," she tells him, looking at him up and down through her lashes. He colors a bit, and she laughs at him. Some things don't change. "You never said you could be _pretty_."

"Ah," he says. She kisses his cheek. It's soft and cool, and barely felt. A first drop of rain in a summer storm, and gone back into the air as quickly. "Er." 

"And so well-spoken," says Tegan.

 

VI.

"I've fixed the chameleon circuit," he announces, with a theatrical flourish. "As I told you, recalibrating the environmental matrix was a snap." The TARDIS shakes a bit, and Peri holds onto her chair. "Just a leftover from the power redistribution," he says. "It'll pass in a moment." The ship shakes harder, and Rose appears, looking harried. "You're not needed. This is simply an transitional phase in which the-"

There is an enormous boom and several smaller booms, and a whirling sensation like being flushed down an immense intergalactic toilet takes hold. It's difficult to hear over Peri's screams, but he thinks he hears Rose use several words that no responsible Gallifreyan would ever have programmed her to repeat. Several further adjustments- and one distress signal- later, they've landed in a scrapyard. It's a bit nostalgic, really, good old scrapyards, but he doesn't dwell. Instead, he parades Peri out to admire his handiwork. "See?" he says. "Camouflage. It's merely a sophisticated trick of the environmental sensors, rendering the appearance-"

"It's a stove," says Peri. She glances at him sideways. "I suppose if anyone comes knocking for you, you can come out with a cake in your hand." He huffs at her and stomps away. The world needs saving, even if nobody else seems to register the urgency. And it's merely his imagination, a trick of the senses, that he thinks he hears the tinny, distant sound of laughter coming from inside the ship.

 

VII.

"You have to tell her."

"Tell her what?" he asks, circling the console. He doesn't look up. She will be standing there with her arms crossed and that expression of intense worry on her face. She knows, of course she knows. She saw him arrange the coordinates, sweep the girl up, perform his little pantomimes. Time storm, indeed. There's nothing you can hide from your own navigational operation matrix. She feels for this one, practically bleeds for this little runaway Londoner, if a carefully programmed projection can be said to do so. He doesn't know why exactly. And so she'll pick at him, at his defenses, at his evasions, until he crumbles, thinking she's doing the girl some kind of service. He can't have that. She's simply too good at it, or he's too weak. This is a very old song and dance now, and one he doesn't care to follow along with at the moment. She can't possibly understand what hangs in the balance.

"Ace has a right to know that you're- using her."

"Does she?" he says. Very casually. He clicks the regulators back. "You don't think that would complicate things somewhat?"

"They're a bit complicated now."

"Why haven't we ever had a real game?" he asks, suddenly. "Not one in hundreds of years. Chess, of course. I think you're suited for it. A game of attack and defense. You've got the instincts, every good pilot does." He checks and double-checks their rate of speed, their relative angles. Not long now. Not long at all. The pieces are in place, and he's only got to hold firm, to do what needs doing. He can't turn corners slowly at this juncture, hold hands and look both ways. Too critical. He adjusts the calibration. "Why don't we give it a try, one of these days? A proper game, just you and I."

"No thanks."

"Afraid you'll have a tactical advantage?" he chuckles to himself. "My dear, I can think just as fast as your circuits can connect. We're a match."

"I'd be a rubbish opponent," Rose says. Her voice is toneless, far-off. Her fingers trace the edge of the console without really touching it. "Truth is, I just like to see you win." 

He looks up, but she's already gone.

 

 

" _Doctor_!"

He can hear her voice, high and panicked, shouting for him. Old gods, is it that time again? Regeneration is such a bother, all the mess and the fear, the pain and brightness- the feeling of being washed away, scrubbed off like a coat of varnish, wrung out. 

"My dear," he says, calmly as he can, from flat on his back in the middle of a very wet street, "my dear, there's no reason to shout." There's entirely too much shouting whenever this happens. Someday, he'd like to regenerate at a spa, in a plush robe with civilized music piping in from all around. He feels a stabbing pain lance him through the midsection, and again. It takes his breath away and crosses his eyes. He's warm- boiling hot- in the center of his chest and freezing everywhere else. Dratted bullets. She's yelling something about _him_ and _the box_ and something about the _cloister bell_ and him again- no, different him this time, sorry, this time she's just calling his name, a warning. He really ought to be paying closer attention, but then, he can't exactly get his ears or his limbs or anything at hand to obey. He hears the TARDIS door swing abruptly shut, with one last furious shriek behind it, and then only a faint muffled sound. A young man with dark hair and a panicked expression suddenly looms close above him.

"I'll get an ambulance!" he says, patting the Doctor's chest. It's painful and unwanted, but awfully considerate. The boy gets up and starts to disappear somewhere into the blur that is the rest of the world.

"She can't-" the Doctor manages, weakly batting at the air around him, hoping to catch hold of an ankle. Somehow, this seems important. "Stuck," he says. "Inside the ship. Hologram, you see."

"Not a ship," says the young man, kindly. "An ambulance. Don't worry, old man." And then he's gone, except for the sound of his feet crashing through puddles.

"Oh, eight hundred imaginary _hells_ ," says the Doctor.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "You could ask her again," says Rose. She is sitting across from him in a chair, with her feet on the coffee table. It doesn't matter, it's not as if she's ever tracked dirt in. It's impossible. He wonders, though, how she manages not to slide directly through the chair, being an insubstantial projection and all.

VIII.

He has his tongue partway into Grace Holloway's mouth when the Eye of Harmony opens and everything starts to make a fatal sort of sense.

"Er," he says. She raises one sculpted eyebrow at him.

"Er?"

"There's a madman in my ship," he says. "He wants to steal my body and my remaining lives. And he'll probably destroy the planet in the process." She is backing away from him very slowly and carefully. Well, in for a penny, he thinks. "Grace. You must help me. I need to find a very particular kind of clock." This date is going to get much, much worse before it gets better. He feels a throbbing in his head, and realizes only too late what it means. Remote retinal imaging! The absolute bastard! They've probably got an eyeful already. 

A lot of things happen awfully quickly. And then:

"Lee, this is your last chance," he says. He's begging. He can beg, he doesn't mind. He's only been in this body for a handful of hours, and he hasn't built up the usual amount of indignant pride just yet. Who knows, this one might never. He does enjoy this floppy cravat. Humility would be novel. Lee gives him the faintest, oddest little half-smile.

"This is my only chance," says Lee. The Master gloats and says something pretentious and totally false. And then the Doctor hears the barest whisper, like a sigh, coming from the empty space just to Lee's left.

_Now_ , it says. And in one swift turn, Lee gives the Master an enormous shove that sends him toppling over the staircase, head over heels. He lands with a crash and a broken scream, but Lee's already jumped the railing and is busy yanking at the Doctor's cuffs. He manages to get one hand loose before Grace- possessed green eyes flashing with rage- comes up behind him and wraps her arms around his neck. Lee goes flailing off backwards and the Doctor struggles to get the other shackle off his wrist. "Let me," says that same invisible voice, and suddenly it's Rose, Rose here with the sonic, breaking the lock and setting him free. Well, that explains how Lee got in to start with: moments ago, he'd been concerned with the TARDIS's grossly lax security, but now he's beginning to see the big picture. His autopilot is forever turning people's hearts to compassionate goo once they've had five minutes alone with her. There was that miner's rebellion on Celsus Nine, when they held him hostage and used the ship to- _hello, focus_ , he thinks fiercely to himself. They both turn for the stairs but there's the Master at the bottom, right over the Eye, holding Lee with one arm pinned behind his back. 

"Don't!" Rose cries out, and the Master cracks Lee's neck in a fluid swipe. " _NO_!" The Doctor grips the railing so hard, either he or it might snap. His teeth grit.

"I heard you," the Master tells Rose, conversationally. Grace draws closer, and the Master holds her by the hair. The strange light begins to drain from her eyes. "Talking to him. The first time. Thought you were so subtle. I remembered you, of course. The Doctor's little caged bird. All song and no dance."

"I remember you, too," says Rose. "All your failures." The Master's eyes narrow with rage. "Your rubbish plots."

"She's right," the Doctor cuts in. "You've killed your one chance. You're finished."

"Not exactly," the Master sneers. He thrusts Grace forward, into the beam. "Always bring a spare!" he screams, and the Eye opens, flooding the room with light. There's a great quaking in the TARDIS and an incredible surge of energy pulses across the walls. The Doctor's pinned by a powerful relay beam, and the Master throws Grace aside. Rose is with her in an instant, helping her to stand, even though her hands probably go right through Grace's sleeves. The Doctor finds he can barely speak, barely summon the will to communicate- there's a force like a raging wind being drawn out of him, pulled with incredible ferocity. A strange thing, to die twice in so many days. He looks across the room at them, both looking back at him.

"Go!" he cries. They nod, and run off down the corridor. He shuts his eyes, while the Master rambles on and on about the incredible things he's going to do with all those extra opportunities. "Yes, of course," says the Doctor. "Since you were so careful with your last dozen."

There's a fistfight and a dramatic reversal, and naturally the women save the day. He can hear Grace and Rose coming from down the hall, joy in their voices, but he stays put. He listens to the hum of his ship around him, now settled back into the time stream, purring contentedly like a great fifth-dimensional cat. He lies on the floor of the cloister room for a long moment, feeling totally at peace with the universe.

After all that, she won't come with him.

"You could ask her again," says Rose. She is sitting across from him in a chair, with her feet on the coffee table. It doesn't matter, it's not as if she's ever tracked dirt in. It's impossible. He wonders, though, how she manages not to slide directly through the chair, being an insubstantial projection and all. "Doctor, are you listening?" He wasn't. It seems he is a rambling sort of man this go-round. 

"My apologies," he says, and tilts his teacup at her. "Go on."

"I _said_ , you could ask her again." Rose looks thoughtful. "You never know. Some girls like to be asked twice."

He says he'll file it away.

 

 

"Somebody else," she says. "Anybody else. Not you." She's on the opposite side of the console, staring straight down at the controls. She won't look at him. She hasn't looked at him since he told her what he was planning to do. It's like she can't. She faced down the Nightmare Child at his side, and now she won't look at him. "We can contact another ship-"

"Rose," he says. "There are no other ships."

 

 

They sit side by side on the grating in silence, out here in the darkness, the TARDIS spiraling around and around in the space of one second. Eternity is found in a second, he thinks, except this time it's not in the poetic sense. He has put them out of sync with the rest of the universe, so that the shockwaves will not disintegrate them the instant he begins the time-lock. The shockwaves might very well disintegrate them the instant afterwards, but that is the risk he is going to take. One of the risks he is going to take, out of many. He is holding the control pad in his hands almost idly, pretending it's a box of tea or a toaster oven or an inconsequential toy. He has finished the wiring and entered the phase coordinates with Rose's help, and now there are only two things left to do. The first is to go back to the war. The second is to end it.

"It'll be an enormous drain on the power," he tells her, distantly. Retreating into the facts. "Secondary systems will go down first. It'll be your job to keep the resistance levels-"

"I'm a secondary system," she says. He stares at her. 

"No," he says. "You aren't." 

She doesn't mention it again.

They stand up, or rather, he does. Rose just disappears and reappears standing, the show-off. He thinks, absurdly, of Pinocchio. Perhaps things become most real in the moments you're not looking at them. He wobbles a bit, without meaning to, as he straightens up, and Rose takes his hands in hers to steady him, cradles them in her cool palms before the illusion dissolves and she's passed through him. She keeps them there for a second anyway, her transparent fingers melded with his. It's as if they're holding hands. 

"You know what I wish most?" she asks. He doesn't. "To go out of those doors with you. Just once would have been enough. To walk out with you, and come back with you." She leans up and presses a cool, soft kiss to his cheek. "It would have been wonderful." He feels heat behind his eyes, an abrupt swell of tears, which he refuses to allow. He can't. He won't. He doesn't know why, but her words fill him with a nameless bitterness. A great well of sadness, a crushing ache in a place he thought deadened by war. It's been hundreds of years, and countless terrors, and he didn't know this. Didn't know her one, most cherished dream. 

"I would have taken you anywhere," he says. It's a promise. A vow. "Everywhere."

"You did," she says.

They push the buttons together.

 

IX.

At first, he's sure he's dead. 

He hopes so.

 

 

It's the worst regeneration sickness of his life. He thought the others were bad: amnesia, multiple personality shifts, almost throttling Peri. The first gasp of consciousness is a blur of agony. He can still remember the console shattering around him, shrapnel from the walls piercing his skin- he aches and stings in all the same places, his head is splitting and his eyes register only splashes of color and brightness, like explosions still firing randomly. Worse, he can barely cling to his own memories, can barely remember anything but the shattering sound of time exploding and remaking itself around them, the great howl of the void, the pull of the dark. He's supposed to be healing. It feels instead like a very long death. 

After a few days- or weeks, he doesn't know, his sense of time is crackling wildly as a broken radio- of lying on his side or his back, curling up when the pain hits and passing out for long stretches, he finds he can control his arms and legs a bit better than yesterday. He drags himself along the grates and props his back up against the console. His jacket's in tatters, and it no longer fits him across the shoulders. He tugs at it, and tries to sit up straighter. He thinks he's seeing things, but slowly his eyes register the glimmering distortions as bio-cells running along the walls. He looks up. The support beams have twisted, he thinks. It takes him a while to realize that they've grown that way, like tree trunks forming in resistance to a stubborn wind. Or coral, swaying in the ocean depths. He closes his eyes from the effort of conscious sight, and pats the bottom of the console with one hand.

"Hello," he says. It's the first thing his parched, swollen throat can manage. "I like it," he says. "Looks good." The lights flicker warmly, appreciatively. Speech is exhausting, but he feels he ought to tell her something positive. He remembers the burned-out shell he died in, flames still licking the walls, the hull breached and the Eye cracked through the middle. She's been working as hard as he has, to rebuild herself, patch her skin, grow a new support structure. His beautiful, brilliant ship. Living is exhausting work. He can try it if she's willing. "Rose," he says. Perhaps she can tell him where they've landed, if they've landed. He hopes they've landed. He doesn't want to think about the possibilities, just yet. That they failed, and the war rages on. That they failed, and the war was lost. That they are inside the void. That there is nothing left in the universe but him and his TARDIS and a computer program with an exceptionally beautiful smile. "Rose," he says again.

He opens his eyes.

And he remembers. He remembers all of it, in a great wash, like being thrown into the sea. He remembers their resistance, how their weapons turned on him at the end. He battled two armies at once while the walls of time fell, and his ship rebuilt them in a new image from the dimensional singularity at her core. He remembers shouting commands, and Rose's fingers moving in a holographic blur over the controls. He remembers the great shock that threw them out of the universe briefly, and the wrenching suction of the time seal that dragged them back in. He remembers the darkness, and the fire in the TARDIS, and he remembers her face- he remembers her eyes in the second before she vanished. His hearts thud wildly. With a great effort, he heaves himself up onto the console, feeling his legs quake and then hold. "Autopilot," he says. "Initiate sequence." He summons up the memory banks, activity logs, enters command prompts. There's nothing, except a kind of distressed psychic undercurrent that seems to be coming from the TARDIS itself. He scours the damaged cortex, runs every diagnostic, digs into the archives and examines every file, searches, probes, calls and recalls. There are so many gaps, so many healing scars, in his ship's mind. At last he finds it, the node where autopilot functions are joined to the system. There is nothing there. There's no trace of her. Of anything. The secondary systems have been burnt up, burnt out. Erased at the root. "Rose," he says. The ship has no memory of her. He lets go of the monitor and slumps to the floor. His eyes burn, but nothing comes. He's too empty to make tears. He holds his face and sobs without sound. He's not sure what he's crying for, or what he isn't crying for. He feels ashamed. There are death rites he could perform for his people, his family, ways he could mark their passing. He ought to get up. But he doesn't know how. He just needs to hear a voice, one voice, telling him- he doesn't know. Anything would do. But there's nothing. There's nobody left, nobody at all, nobody will ever know or remember, not even- he sobs harder and harder like a child, uncontrollably, until he's wrung out. He curls up in his ruined jacket and falls into a formless, dreamless sleep.

The readout has already told him that he is orbiting a fading star in the Selluca system, not far from the edge of the Gamma district, in the year one million. There is an ion storm passing about five hundred thousand miles away. Environmental conditions within and without the ship are stable. It is the Sellucan equivalent of a Thursday. Everything he's ever known and everyone he's ever loved is gone.

 

 

At first he thinks he will just stay here, in this spot, letting the TARDIS turn and turn until her lights fade and her hull ices and he turns into a skeleton underneath the grating. But it's such a disgustingly maudlin fantasy that he berates himself for having it. Next he thinks he should chameleon arch himself, bury the memories, live an ordinary life and die an ordinary death and be buried in somebody else's soil. But that's cheating. Whatever he does, he refuses to forget. Forgetting is what the rest of the universe does. He's not allowed. That's the punishment for living. 

So instead of all that he goes down to the wardrobe and picks himself out a jumper and a jacket and pair of jeans, and puts his tattered old costume into a box. He does it without looking in the mirror, because vanity is also not allowed anymore. He's got no interest in what this body looks like. It's only a body. He goes back up to the console and sets the receiver on a wider range, sits back, and listens.

The first distress call is the one he answers.

He saves a group of colonists from an exploding reactor. They're a blue-skinned people with fetching ridges on their cheeks. He doesn't stay long enough for them to hold a party in his honor. Because he's off to find the missing cargo ship that drifted into a stasis minefield with a plucky crew still aboard. He rescues them, very narrowly, from being turned into floating debris. And then there's Chatfield, Minnesota, in 2059, something about stolen fusion cells. Death is so close on that one he can taste it on the wind, in the air, as it whistles past him. It feels like a summer breeze. He inhales a little deeper and moves on. He'll catch it if he's quick enough next time. He picks up a rumor that the Nestene Consciousness is looking to reassert itself, set down roots somewhere nice and cozy and heavily populated. That sounds promising. Easy enough to spot their first wave of clunky automatons being brought in en masse to retailers. Plastic, in whatever form, is never all that smart. He's right in the midst of one of their hubs, heading up from the loading dock to the elevator, when he hears the voice calling down the hall. A girl's voice, young and frightened. No civilians, that's another rule. No more collateral damage. Not allowed. He rolls his eyes and heads off to find her, scoop her up, deposit her outdoors, and then back to the plan. A massive explosion and a perfectly-timed escape. Down to the second. He finds her in the back room of the basement, a pink and yellow girl flat against the wall with her arms up in terror, half a dozen autons lined up in front of her. He grabs her hand.

"Run," he says, and they do. Breathless down the hall, into the elevator, where the doors shut with a slam, taking off a plastic arm in the process. "So," he says, "best if you forget you ever-" and the girl turns around. His entire body quakes once, like he's been pushed back with enormous force, and he hits the wall of the elevator hard. His arms scramble against the wall at strange angles. His mouth opens and shuts and opens again. " _Rose_ ," he says, stupidly. "Rose." Her eyes narrow. 

"How d'you know my name?" Everything about her is perfect, perfectly duplicated, or perfectly imitated, down to the dark eyebrows and the cant of her hips and the way she tilts her head, wonderingly, warily. It's his autopilot, here, alive and- breathing? Is his autopilot breathing? He comes forward and she moves back. She brandishes the arm at him. "I don't think so," she says, threateningly. He's still staring at her, thinking about rubbing his eyes to make sure he's not hallucinating, in shock, dead and in an extended final sequence. Is it really important to know which one? Probably not. "What's the matter with you?" she asks him. "Are you hurt?"

"No," he says. "How-" he puts his hand over one heart anyway, to stop the pounding there. "How are you here? Tell me how you did it. No. Don't tell me. I'll guess. Hard light relay sequencing?" She stares at him in total confusion. "No." Something clicks. "Do you not- recognize me?"

"Mate," she says, "You've got me mixed up with somebody else." The elevator dings and the doors open. Wordlessly, mechanically, he steps out, and gestures for her to do the same. She holds onto the arm but follows him anyway, eyes still searching him. He takes her out by the back doors, holds the gate for her, and watches her go down the steps. She turns around, and he just stands there, stuck. Processing. His mind moves a million miles a minute, but it's still not quite fast enough to catch up to this new and impossible bit of information. "What are you doing?" she asks. "Come on. I'll call the police." She waves the arm at him. "Is this your plan? Standing around?"

"Working so far, isn't it?" he returns, reflexively. He must have had a thousand arguments with her, just like this, with her beautiful eyes flashing at him. This has to be a dream, a trick, a trance, but he doesn't care. He just wants to stand here on these steps and make her mad, make her yell at him and correct him and speak to him, look at him, know him. It's exhilarating. "But I was thinking something more drastic," he says, and pulls out the relay. "You'll want to be a bit further away when this goes off."

"Is that a bomb?" Her voice rises in pitch. "You'll blow yourself up!"

"Maybe," he says. "Maybe not, eh?" He smiles at her and she stares back at him as if he's mad. Well, that's hardly a new experience. It's so familiar it hurts like a bruise. He doesn't want it to stop. "Go on," he says. "Run for your life." He shuts the door behind him and practically sprints to the rooftop, hearts taking the pennant in his chest. When the bomb goes off, all he can think about is the feeling of her hand in his, the warm press of it, how solid and real and human it felt, the slight pulse in her wrist and the pull of her arm. He makes it out to the street and stares up at the secondary explosions, the raging plume of fire that goes up into the night. He feels inexplicably like dancing in front of it. Reality has officially taken a holiday. "Rose!" he calls out, into the darkness. He's running now. He'll catch up to her and they'll watch it together, the sparks and the smoke, holding hands. People are coming out of bars and buses, turning to look, wondering at the chaos. " _Rose_!" he cries.

But nobody answers.

 

 

Rose _Tyler_ has a mother. And a boyfriend, and a flat on an upper floor, and Rose _Tyler_ makes tea for them both, and Rose _Tyler_ is nearly suffocated by a plastic arm in her own living room. Rose _Tyler_ has never seen him before in her exceedingly short human life. But Rose Tyler is nineteen, and brave as a lion, and willing to kick dangerous plastic automatons over the side of a railing whilst dangling from an enormous chain. She does this for a stranger, a man she's never met, and for the sake of the world, and then she puts her arms around Mickey and says, sadly, that she'd better not go. In a daze, he nods and goes back to the TARDIS and puts the ship into orbit and stands around staring at nothing for a long, long time. It could be the Trickster, he thinks. A little pocket parallel universe. He runs some diagnostics and dematerializes and takes the ship out to the next quadrant and back. Could be a memory fracture in his own cortex. He gives himself a full work-up in the medbay and comes up with nothing. It could be a hiccup in the universe, some sort of massive re-set from when he hit the switch, a remnant or a left-over. He tells himself it doesn't matter, regardless. She's not his Rose. She stared and said, _it's bigger on the inside_ , for goodness' sake. She's human. Fragile, mortal, foolish. She won't know how to steer, she doesn't remember him. Them. Anything. It's not a second chance. It doesn't change things. It could be a trap. It could be a gaffe, a coincidence, a portent, a mistake.

It could be a gift.

He thinks about her transparent feet up on the coffee table, her thoughtful smile and the secret in her eyes. She said something important. _Some girls_ , he remembers. _Some girls like to be asked twice_. He spins the dials in a hurry, and the ship moves even faster than he does, humming with eagerness. He flies to the doors and flings them open and there she is, still standing in the same spot, trash and newspapers scuttling in the wind, Mickey clinging to her knees, an incandescent smile just beginning to dawn on her face. The sun in springtime isn't warmer, or more dazzling, or more welcome after the snows. He holds out his hand, and she comes running to take it.

"Right then, Rose Tyler," he says. "What's it going to be?" 

"Everywhere," she says.

It feels very much like a promise.

 

 

The first time he sees her eating- an apple, the very first thing is an apple, he files that away in the new mental jumble of things marked _Rose???Tyler_ \- his eyes bulge out of his head. From the suspicious look she gives him afterwards, there was something like naked surprise plastered across his face. It's shaming. He's always thought himself capable of at least playing it cool.

"Did they not have apples, where you're from?" she asks. He grimaces and evades the question by taking her to the great orchards of Gebulalala, where they grow apples that produce starbursts behind your eyelids and sweet songs in your ears as you eat them. He eats two and Rose eats three. He laughs so hard at her reactions that she pounds on his back to keep him from choking.

"Respiratory bypass," he says, waving her off. But he doesn't mind, not really. He is not trying to keep a catalogue of every touch and every touch's sensation, and still it's happening. He has held her hand and helped her upright and pulled her away by the sleeve and she has rested her hand on his arm and slapped him on the back and now she is tugging him down the row of trees, pointing at things eagerly, asking him to give names to everything in sight, and to explain their functions, and to introduce her to all the workers and tell her how best to introduce herself. "Just smile at them," he says, only half-jokingly, and she does. A young man startles and flushes and drops a basket of apples and they roll around at his feet. "It always seems to work fine for you."

He takes her to the market on Tel Telaxis and watches her hands wander over fine silks, fabrics of incredible softness and luxurious touch. Her fingers rest lightly on things and stroke them and turn them over and she marvels at the feel of everything, the richness. Her hands don't go through anything. They never get translucent or begin to disappear. She's entirely corporeal and solid and her senses are always working overtime, taking things in, processing them, producing new observations and reactions. He enjoys watching that more than anything. He tries to buy her a bolt of sky-blue cloth that feels airy and feathery as dove's wings, and she shrugs him off, kindly.

"I'm not that fancy," she says. But she's wrong, she's so utterly wrong. He starts to insist and her eyes get cloudy, sad. "Don't need presents," she tells him, misunderstanding. "I didn't come with you for presents." He doesn't know how to explain it. He wants to give her a million beautiful things that she can touch and hold and keep. He wants to watch her holding them. He needs to know she's real. She gets tired and falls asleep on the jumpseat sometimes, snoring a little with her mouth open and her hair matted and her face pressed so hard on her sleeve it makes little patterns in her flesh. This is new, too. Everything goes in the file. He stays awake and putters with the console and when he is sure that she's dreaming, fully gone and not going to laugh at him, he stares at her for a while. He thinks about stroking her hair in her sleep, tucking strands of it behind her ears, pulling a blanket over her. He never knew where Rose went when she vanished- _away_ \- but Rose Tyler stays Rose Tyler at every moment. She is more than he ever imagined. When she wakes up, he asks her if she'd like to see Christmas in Italy or on the other moon of Poosh, not the missing one. She says Poosh, but her eyes are distant. She's been dreaming something unpleasant. She looks up at him, her hair still undone and wild about her temples. Like a ragged halo. Or a daisy crown, pure innocence. "When you met me," she asks, and his blood goes especially cold, "who did you mistake me for?"

"An old friend."

"An old friend," she repeats, and smiles slyly. "Or an old _friend_?"

"Italy it is!" he says, and gives the accelerator a jerk. She laughs and tumbles around on the jump seat and then she's off downstairs, picking out a costume. He doesn't think about it much as they run for their lives and face down death in a dingy Cardiff basement- hand in hand, for the file- but it's all he can think about afterwards. He has no idea what he'd tell her, what she'd say. How she'd look at him. If she'd leave.

"Do you think we could stop for a minute," she asks, later, "and see my mum?" In any other body, he'd have said no. In fact, he frequently has.

"Fine," he says. He tries to look tough and mean and put-upon as he says it. He rolls his eyes and spins the dials and sighs with exaggerated saintliness. But inside he is whispering the same word over and over: _stay_. Stay, stay stay stay stay stay.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's everything, really. Plums taste brighter and sweeter, spring rain permeates his very soul. Jam is a revelation. He lies down in flowerbeds and buries his face affectionately in the scruffy coats of alien dogs and scratches every itch until pleasurable agony shoots through him, scalp to fingertips. He's on overload. He finally knows how candles feel, rockets, yule logs. Everything that burns and burns and becomes something else when the burning's done.

Rose Tyler swallows Time, and so becomes time's god. At least for a little while. His own people called themselves timelords, but the truth is, they served it, not the other way around. They fetched and carried it, tended and guarded it, and occasionally coaxed it into various shapes for their own amusement. But not Rose Tyler. Rose Tyler stretches out her fingers and time leaps forward to do her bidding. It eats the daleks and gnashes its teeth for a sweeter meal. It grinds the fleet into dust and devours the emperor. But for every altered strand of time there is a price. For knowing everything, seeing everything, you will lose all. Especially yourself. He gathers Rose Tyler, god of time, into his arms. There are tear stains on her cheeks. He kisses her and for a second, he wonders if they'll just burn together, right here. If they'll vanish, consumed by flame, into the universe. _Everything must come to dust_ , she said. 

Even him. 

But he's not so afraid. Not this time. It's strange, the sense of lightness that comes over him. He's had his miracle, miracles plural, so much for one man. So he tries to remember, as he goes: an old prayer, the only one that made sense. The first lesson of awe. Everything-

 

X.

-is a beginning.

 

 

"Hello," he says. He licks his teeth. They taste new. Rose gapes at him. "Is it weird?" he asks. He points up at his own face and realizes he's slightly in the wrong spot. Well, adjustment period. Totally to be expected. He leans forward and spins the accelerator, punches in a few coordinates. Probably best they lie low for a bit. There will always be Barcelona, Praaccis, the five moons of Ursulon. Unless, you know. He ends up destroying those as well one day. He turns around and Rose is still looking at him like a cornered cat. "You'd tell me if it was weird, wouldn't you? Three eyes, spare nose, hair everywhere but on top?" He spins in a circle, trying to see his own knees. "Maybe an enormous beauty mark? Come on then, out with it."

"You're-"

" _I'm_ ," he agrees, pleasantly. "Oh Rose, you've got to tell me. Take a good look." He swoops close to her and she recoils, but not fast enough. He puts his hands on her shoulders, holds her firmly. "This is very important. Am I. Ginger." He blinks. "Am I ginger?"

"Bring him back," says Rose. Her voice shakes, but her eyes are level. "Bring him back _this minute_." He lets her go and she retreats to the column.

"Is that what you want?"

"Yes."

"Can't," he says. He feels a sudden surge of frustration. He's not sure why. He also can't remember which foot is left and which is right, and so he stumbles on his way to the console. Rose reaches forward reflexively to steady him, but pulls her hand back at the last second. They stare at each other, inches apart. "Rose," he says, mournfully. Is his brain moving faster, or his mouth? He's not sure. "You were never like this before. Thought you liked the novelty. New man," he says, and gestures vaguely up and down his own torso. "I've been lots of new men." His face feels flushed, his limbs rubbery. "Remember? I was pretty for you, once." He snorts. "Fat lot of good it did me. Did you know-" he starts, and then falls face first onto the grating. Rose kneels over him with a little cry of surprise, rolls him onto his side, and sweeps the hair- hair again, blimey, lovely- out of his face. Her eyes look hurt and confused and sparkly and out of focus all at once. Has he said something? He's probably said something. He'll apologize. But he finds he can't see clearly, and so she becomes a lovely warm-colored blur above him. 

"Doctor?" she asks. So very softly. He shuts his eyes and smiles.

"That's the one," he says, and passes resolutely into unconsciousness. When he wakes up- much, much later- there's tea spilled all over his pajamas, and Rose is busy saving earth from intergalactic slavers. 

 

 

Rose Tyler smells _amazing_. Like clean woman, fresh bare skin and laundered clothes, a hint of drugstore shampoo, a touch of grass, sweat, excitement. Did he ever notice it before? He's sure he did. But never quite with this intensity, this commitment to cataloging every atom that rolls off of her in waves. The file is full to bursting now, now that he's hoarding everything all at once, all the time. How has this happened? His senses are typically sharper than the average tack's, but this is something else. When he holds her close, he inhales like he's diving. He drowns. It's everything, really. Plums taste brighter and sweeter, spring rain permeates his very soul. Jam is a revelation. He lies down in flowerbeds and buries his face affectionately in the scruffy coats of alien dogs and scratches every itch until pleasurable agony shoots through him, scalp to fingertips. He's on overload. He finally knows how candles feel, rockets, yule logs. Everything that burns and burns and becomes something else when the burning's done.

"You're so different," she says to him, when they are lying under the stars on Mela Lura. They are especially fine stars, and an especially fine night for admiring them. He's spread his coat out for her on the pale blue, fern-soft grass. Far away, there's the sound of music, a summer festival, and also a celebration in gratitude of not having been crushed by their own satellite. They've named a dessert after Rose and nothing after him. Yet. All in a day's work, he supposes. Now they are shoulder to shoulder on their backs. Not that he'd like to admit it, but he's spent the last fifteen minutes edging slowly closer to her side, where her hip becomes the softer skin of her stomach, where her arm nests. He has told himself firmly that it's a casual gesture. It's merely gravitational pull. Orbit. Thermal conservation, really. He's an environmentalist. He wonders if she's noticed. "But certain things are the same," she says, finally. He lifts up on one elbow and looks down at her. Her hair's undone again, pooling around her head. One strand is stuck to her cheek. 

"What things?"

"Important things," she says. She smiles at him. It's one part sweet and several parts sly. "You still get so offended when anybody criticizes your driving."

"A mallet is a perfectly acceptable-"

"Hmm," she says, and he shuts his mouth with a snap. "Oh, and you still won't admit that Ethelred was right about that bridge." He scowls. "I remember you, neck-deep in muddy water, telling him he was an-"

"-unready ape?" He sighs. "Point taken." He pretends to study his own fingernails. "Anything else?"

"You still love this," she says. She gestures up at the astonishing stars, and his gaze follows her there, and beyond. "All of this." There is a staggering distance between them and the sky, and yet he knows it's nothing compared to the distance between them and those minute pinpricks of light. All crossed in an instant, all within their reach if they choose. The night is limitless and infinite, and also as small as the space around them, the dark that hides them here. They could be the universe's only audience. That thought should sting and scrape at him, needle him with losses and debts, but for the first time, it feels also like a reminder that he is here, with her, alive and close enough to feel her warmth through his sleeve. What was left of him, of the world, wasn't nothing. He feels an old hurt sliding away from him a little, a smaller ache finally unknotting, releasing an inch, leaving him boneless and strangely raw. He can feel her staring at him. When their eyes meet, a shock goes through his spine, not unlike the first time he saw her. He can't pull away, can't look anywhere else. He feels recognized, _seen_ , like a pond of clear water. Her eyes go all the way to the bottom, and find him there. If she could, she'd be reading his mind. There'd be no barriers left between them. He wonders if she sees him as he is, or as he was, or even before that. Or after. She saw it all, didn't she, for a second? What could be, what might be. He wonders what he looks like, to her.

"Anything else?" he whispers, again. This time, when she smiles at him, it's so kind it breaks every heart he has. He couldn't deserve it.

"Just the big one," she says. She puts her hand up to his face, and rubs the skin of his cheek with her thumb, very gently. "You're still the best man I've ever known." He leans down or she leans up, it doesn't matter. What matters is, they meet halfway. What matters is that he kisses her and kisses her and doesn't burn, and he goes on kissing her while the stars go wheeling by. 

Afterwards- long afterwards, when she's had a bath and a long nap and he's been lying curled up on his side watching the air go in and out of her- she wakes up slowly with a question already on her lips. "Doctor," she says. She doesn't need to get his attention, she has it by existing. But he appreciates the attempt. "When you-" she pauses. "When you changed. You said something about being a new man. Being a lot of new men." She looks him in the eye. "You said I'd always liked that, before. That I never minded when you changed. You said you were pretty for me, once."

"Am I not pretty enough now?" he says. He bats his lashes. She looks like she wants very much to laugh, but doesn't allow herself. 

"Don't dance away from it."

"I could skip."

"You knew me before," she says. He freezes. He underestimates that mental agility of hers, sometimes. So have a lot of other people, to their peril. "You knew me, somehow. And I knew you." He doesn't answer. She waits, and then puts her hand over his. "I don't want you to pretend like you never said that stuff, because I won't pretend that I didn't hear it."

Oh, Rose.

"You're right," he says. "I knew- there was someone very much like you. Not you. But _very_ like. And I lost her. I lost my friend." He swallows against the lump in his throat. "When I met you, I thought, for a second it might- but it wasn't possible. It wasn't, because you're not her. You're so much like her, but you're," he shuts his eyes for a second. " _More_. You're more. More alive, more everything. I'm sorry," he says, "I'm so sorry, I-"

"Is that why you took me with you?"

"No," he says, quickly. "No. I invited you because I wanted to." He curls his hand around hers. "I wanted this."

"My hand?" She's teasing. But she doesn't know how close she is to the unflattering truth. However much things have changed. He leans down and kisses the back of her knuckles. "Are you starving?" she asks, suddenly. "Or is that only me?"

"On Ferra they make a French toast out of moon cakes. With actual moon flour. They don't call it French, mind you. But the concept's the same."

"Is there syrup?"

"Buckets."

"Hurry, then," she says.

 

 

" _Rose_ ," says Sarah Jane. She rushes past him, pressing him into a bank of lockers as she goes, and grabs Rose by both hands. Her face is beaming. "Oh, Rose, how wonderful! I never thought I'd see you again. Do you remember, after Tauros, when I said-" she starts, and then trails off, as if a second train of thought has overtaken the first. And then Sarah Jane looks down at their joined hands, which are still holding firmly onto one another, as human hands are wont to do. "Oh dear," she says.

"Hello," says Rose.

"How?" says Sarah Jane, to him. "How did you-"

"Haven't the foggiest."

"Did you stabilize the projection? She feels entirely solid!"

"Well," he scratches the back of his neck. "She _is_ entirely solid."

"Too many chips," Mickey adds, and looks very pleased with himself. Rose coughs loudly into her closed fist, and they all snap back to reality.

"I am in the room," Rose says, with deceptive calm.

"I don't know what you did or how you did it," Sarah Jane says. She suddenly wraps her arms around Rose and Rose hugs her back with a kind of giddy come-what-may. Over Sarah Jane's shoulder, she shrugs at the Doctor and smiles. Free hugs, her eyes are saying. "But I am so glad to see you two again! So very glad."

They wind up in a chip shop after dark, sitting in a cozy circle around K-9 while he takes out old circuit boards and blows on them and bangs things back into place with the bottom of his shoe. K-9 is stoically uncomplaining about it. Sarah Jane tells stories to Rose and Mickey about old adventures, daring escapes. He feels a surprisingly great sense of well-being, a strange familiar comfort coming over him. Another little piece of evidence. A tally in the threadbare plus column of his own personal accounting. A sign of his old life, times gone by, and still going. Things that went on after him, crops he didn't wither, ground he didn't blight. Sarah Jane's really a remarkable woman. They order a second round of chips, and shortly afterwards they are all politely asked to leave by the owner of the place when coolant starts spraying out of K-9's nose.

"EXCUSE ME," says K-9. 

"Allergies, eh?" says Mickey. "Tough luck." He holds a chip out to the dog on a fork, and then glances up at Sarah Jane. "Can he eat people food?"

But Rose is quiet, uncharacteristically so. He leaves Sarah Jane and Mickey talking over the finer points of canine computer maintenance and follows her across the road. She sits down on a bench, on the far end, and doesn't say anything for a long while. He sits next to her, leaving a little space. There are vibes coming off her in waves, from the set of her shoulders and her jaw, but he can't read them. She's like a little beetle in a shell. Mickey and Sarah Jane burst out laughing at something, and Rose turns to face him.

"Is that what you meant?" she asks. She nods back in the direction of the car. "You said you lost her."

"I told Sarah Jane I'd drop her in Croydon, but back then-"

"Your aim was just as rubbish?" He grins. "That's not what I meant. You said you lost her. Me. The- the other me. Her." Her face tightens, and she rubs it with one hand and sighs. Finally, she says, "Did you really mean that you _misplaced_ her?" Respiratory bypass or no respiratory bypass, his chest constricts. "Is that what this is? Is this how it happens? One day we're, whatever we are," she gestures between them, "and then-" her hands go wide. "Aberdeen."

"No," he says. 

"Are you sure?" she asks.

"Yes." He takes her hand in his. "It's different. I- sometimes it's just," he trails off. Tragically, words fail him. "Different." Idiotic, but utterly true. It's the only word that fits. He folds their fingers together. "I told you I lost her. I lied." Rose's pulse jumps in her wrist. "She was taken from me. By the war." 

"Oh," says Rose. "So-"

"No Aberdeen," he tells her. "Not ever." She looks at him with something bright and sharp in her eyes, a light that threatens to spill over, and all he can think is, that is the most selfish thing I've ever said. A better man wouldn't make that promise, knowing what he knows about human lives. But he doesn't care. He doesn't want to be good, he doesn't need to be righteous. He only wants to keep her as long as he possibly can.

"Good," says Rose at last. She's smiling again. "Because I've got big plans for you."

"Oh, really?"

"Yeah," she says. "First off, I don't want to be a dinner lady. I think I'm more of an administrative liaison, don't you?" She tilts her head. "I'll need a twin set and a clipboard."

"You're going to let that lovely hairnet go to waste?"

"It's not going to go to waste," says Rose, mysteriously. And that is how he ends up serving chips and mushy peas to Dr. Rose Marion.

 

 

When they come back from that dead planet forever circling its own doom, when the beast in the pit has gone, when the rocket is free and everything is as it was, she takes him down the hall and into her room and undresses him slowly, peels his suit off his back and his shirt away from his skin. He sits on the edge of the bed and pulls his socks off with shaking hands, and then she's in his arms, smooth and naked and hot-blooded, pulling him over her and into her. She laughs and arches under him, meets him halfway and pushes back hard. He puts his face in the hollow of her neck and shoulder and kisses her throat. He sinks into her and dissolves. There's nothing in the universe except this bed, this body that used to be two bodies, and is now only her, only her, the most real thing he has ever touched. He wants to be taken into her, completely, at least for this moment. He will be the projection from now on, an image of life, when really he is just a beat in Rose Tyler's heart, a electrical flicker of her memories. 

"You got away from me for a minute there," she says, afterwards. She is lying tangled in his arms and legs, with her chin resting on his chest. It's sweaty and boiling hot everywhere they touch. Wonderful. "Where did you go?"

"Hither and yon," he says. "Now. Have I ever taken you to the Olympics?"

He hasn't.

 

 

"It's not Aberdeen," he says, looking around at the beach. "Where are we, exactly?"

"Dårlig Ulv-Stranden."

"What's that when it's at home?"

"Bad wolf bay," she says. "Surprise." He tries to think of something funny to say about that, something to make her laugh or even smile, but there is nothing funny about that at all. 

"Are you alright?" he says instead. She nods, mutely. "Is everyone alright?" More nodding. "So you're all- fine. Good."

"You really can't come through?" says Rose.

"I really can't."

"And I can't go through, either."

"No."

"Then what good is this universe?" 

"Not much good at all," he says. Rose smiles finally, faintly, and puts her hand up to where his face ought to be. He's gotten his wish in the worst possible sense. He is a hologram, and the irony doesn't escape him. He has made himself as concrete as he can, stuffed as much as himself as he could into that one last crack of space-time, and still it isn't enough. He's just a projection, one that will fade in a minute. He is filing her away like mad, but he knows it won't be enough. He could replay her in his head a million times a day, and it will never be enough again. But of course now he will finally understand where hard-light projections go when they disappear. They go nowhere. They go to a place very much like the void. 

"I love you," she says. "I have forever." Oh, old gods. He doesn't have enough hearts to hold this. How can she manage? She's stronger than him. "Take that through with you." 

"Rose," he says. "I'm sorry."

"For what?"

"For not saying it sooner. For not saying it every day. Every minute." Her eyes nearly swell shut with tears, but she's really smiling now, broadly, bravely. "Rose Tyler, I-"

He dies on the beach. It only looks like vanishing.

 

 

Last time, it made him cold. It froze a part of him and sealed it away, kept the pieces in a block of ice, where they could be seen but not felt. Lying next to Martha on a narrow, rickety sixteenth-century bed, he thinks to himself, _this time it's made me cruel_. He vows to do better. He saw the hurt on her face, the embarrassment, at _Rose would know_. He wasn't wrong. Rose would have felt it by now, sensed it. She always found the odd ones out in the world, discovered the wrong-fitting edges of things. She probably considered herself one of those, if he cared to dig into the psychology of it. But Rose also would have told him not to be such a tremendous ass to a clever and kindhearted woman who'd done nothing but save his life and fill his ship with conversation again.

"I'm sorry," he says, to the ceiling. To her, perhaps. Or a more general plea, to the great absence. He has the feeling he's going to be saying it quite a lot. But he is saved from wallowing in that thought by a sudden burst of screaming from the room down the hall. _Thank goodness_ , he thinks to himself, and then again, guiltily: _cruel_.

 

 

Of course it isn't him who finds her. Of course. He's busy being rolled into walls and fed out of a dog dish, when the Master goes digging in his paradox machine and finds the files and brings everyone downstairs in a great show of pomp and glee to view them together. He pushes the Doctor's wheelchair up the ramp and parks him in front of the console while Francine, Clive and Tish stand to one side, eyeing the door and the jacketed guards on either side of it. The Master hammers the controls and babbles to himself about lost bird and cages, but the Doctor can't help looking elsewhere, up and around, through the abused framework of his captured ship, strung with scaffolding and wires. Pulsing with that terrible, world-rending light. But still alive, he thinks to himself. Like Martha. Alive and fighting, somewhere. He feels close to them both, as if he can sense them just over the next hill, and yet they are still so unbearably far away.

"Ta da!" the Master cries. And Rose Tyler appears. It's only a projection, a rendered image in hard light, but the Doctor can't help himself- he pitches forward in his chair and grips the handles with shock. Not possible. Just not possible. Everything was erased. The files were stripped, scorched. The memory cortex was barren. How, then? "Marvelous," he continues. "Just marvelous. Look at the detail!" The Master walks a circle around her. She's frozen in place, paused, as if from a video feed. Or a photograph. Who's recorded these, why? When? His mind reels with the logistics. Was the ship taking notes? "What wonderful memories I have of this one. Your pet pilot."

"You can't hurt her," the Doctor says, forcing himself to relax his shoulders, unclench his jaw. It's the truth. He could swing an axe at her image for a hundred years and dent only air. She's untouchable. He knows from experience all the limitations of that form. "You never could."

"I don't need to hurt her," the Master says. He smiles like a schoolboy, pure delight and selfishness and the pulling-off of fly's wings. "I'm going to hurt you _with_ her." His hand hovers over a button. "What do you think?" he asks Francine, suddenly. "Erase all? Or one at a time?" The Doctor stares at them both in dawning horror. "Pick," says the Master. "Pick one!" he screams at her.

"One at a time," Francine says. 

"A mother's wisdom," the Master says. "Leave room for hope," he grins, "and it hurts so much longer." He makes a great show of pressing the controls and Rose Tyler- just after the Olympics, twenty-twelve, jean jacket and windswept hair, trainers, luminous eyes reflecting torchlight- vanishes into thin air. "One down!" he cries. He summons up another one- Rose Tyler in a pink top crossed with zippers, hair loose, eyes haunted- and actually gives himself a dramatic drumroll on the edge of the console before he slaps the button down and sends the projection to oblivion. "Another one bites the dust!"

"Stop it," the Doctor manages. 

"You'd like that, wouldn't you." The Master pulls up another- Rose Tyler in a jean jacket again, braids to her shoulders- and contemplates it. "You'd like me to save this one. To let you keep it and stare at it in the long lonely nights." He crouches down to the Doctor's level. "Did you really fall in love with a hologram? Do you have any sense of how deranged that is?"

"Some," says the Doctor. That actually gets him a laugh and then a hearty push that sends him rolling down the ramp to collide with the door.

"Tell you what," he says. "This can be our little ritual. If you're very good, I'll let you press the button yourself a few times. How does that sound?" The Doctor doesn't answer. "I'll take that as a resounding yes." He looks over at Francine, Clive and Tish. "Now, they've got work to do. It's awfully hard to get the Harkness out of the carpets. So we'll meet after breakfast for deletions. Is tomorrow morning good for everyone?" It is supposed to be a flippant statement, but perhaps he ends up regretting it after all, because the following morning is the best morning on record for all the rest of them. Because Martha Jones saves the world. People go back to grocery shopping and driving their cars and complaining about the stock market, all because Martha was willing to walk the soles off her boots and witness countless horrors and finally laugh in a crazy man's face. 

"The year that never was," he calls it, later. Martha very carefully does not look at him, but at the door. She can probably see past it, or through it. Her life is on the other side. She is being very kind to him, but they both know. "It'll be as if it never happened."

"No," says Martha. "It happened." And then he is alone again. For all his hoping, all his begging, he couldn't manage even to be the penultimate timelord, one of a mismatched pair. There is nobody left. He is alone with his ship and his shame and the year that never was.

And seventeen remaining files on Rose Tyler.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _"Back to earth," says Donna. They are sitting on two loungers by an enormous zero-gravity pool complex, owned by Lunar Suites Incorporated. It's almost eleven-thirty in the morning. Donna's informed him- strictly speaking, quite accurately- that it's noon somewhere. He agrees, says that her grasp of space-time is rapidly improving, and she tells him to stop thinking for the love of God. She hands him a daiquiri the size of a punch bowl, and puts on her sunglasses. "I mean it. I can hear those creaky wheels turning in your head." He takes a sip of his drink. It tastes like nuclear fruit and bottled sunshine and illegal Lunorian hyper-spirits._

They're not autopilot files. He checked and re-checked them, tried to figure out how they were recorded, when, why. They are not the same programs that were lost long before. They're brand-new video captures, data feeds on voice and movement, preserved smiles and anxious stares, frozen laughs, mimicked posture. A miniature catalogue of Rose Tyler in the wild. He didn't make them. He doesn't know who did. He plays them back a few times, thinking at first that it will help. It doesn't. It only makes it worse, the tinned phrases, things she said to him before, animated and present and solid and real, now played back through the speakers while her edges flicker in his vision. They are the same every time, and that's what makes them unbearable. She always surprised him, even when he felt that he could read her mind, even when he knew her so well he could sense what muscle would twitch in her thigh as she slept. Living people are not puzzle boxes, but roads unfolding across meadows, trails that must be followed. Fresh footprints, broken twigs, gullies to cross over, sudden expanses of sky overhead. All replete with meaning. But she's gone and left him behind in unmarked woods, without a sign. He wanders proverbially as a cloud. 

"Back to earth," says Donna. They are sitting on two loungers by an enormous zero-gravity pool complex, owned by Lunar Suites Incorporated. It's almost eleven-thirty in the morning. Donna's informed him- strictly speaking, quite accurately- that it's noon somewhere. He agrees, says that her grasp of space-time is rapidly improving, and she tells him to stop thinking for the love of God. She hands him a daiquiri the size of a punch bowl, and puts on her sunglasses. "I mean it. I can hear those creaky wheels turning in your head." He takes a sip of his drink. It tastes like nuclear fruit and bottled sunshine and illegal Lunorian hyper-spirits. It makes his knees hot and wobbly and his stomach cold. Heightened tolerance, ha ha. Perhaps his biology teachers were joking, but he's got no-one to ask. Donna looks at him over the tops of her lenses. "Better?" He thinks for a minute while frozen chunks of pineapple settle.

"Better," he admits.

 

 

He doesn't often worry about time passing. Except for when it's passing too quickly or too slowly, outliers, marks of Wrong. Normal time passing isn't his concern. It's the business of the universe. And for one thing, worrying about that would be wildly ironic. For another, it would be unspeakably sad. If time was indeed linear- which it isn't- then it would be a long line entirely covered in asterisks, urgent notations for lost moments, things left unclaimed and sentences left unfinished, absent friends. It would be a horrible thing to look at, the drawn-out circumstances of his life. There would be a great red line slashed through it, three-quarters of the way down. And at this end, he would be unbearably far from Susan. Unbearably far from his world. Thankfully, time is not a line or a calendar. It's a great big ball that rolls itself around in erratic loops. Everything is still close enough so as to be nearly touching. 

"That makes no sense," says Donna. They are locked in a root cellar. They were put there by enormous sentient bees wearing hand-sewn pants. Something's clearly wrong in future Kansas. And why, exactly, is it always oversized _Apoidea_ with them? Perhaps they need a comically large can of Raid for their next outing. Donna steps un-gently on his foot to regain his attention, and he manfully refrains from yelping. "How exactly is time a ball?"

"It's a metaphor," he says, and immediately wonders if that's incorrect. Or outdated. Time might be a dodecahedron, for all he knows anymore. He hasn't been reading the journals. "Time isn't a straightforward progression of one thing after another, unless you're stuck inside it. And half of that's perception, anyhow." She stares at him. "If you could move outside of time, you'd see that things happen simultaneously. Or over and over and over. And that the variables for one thing happening instead of another thing are incredibly complex. Really, it's a mess."

"Pompeii," says Donna. "How could we go to Pompeii, if it's already gone off. Because it's still happening. That's what you're saying."

"Yes, well done."

"Or Agatha Christie," she continues. "We didn't know why she disappeared exactly until we were there, carrying her into the TARDIS. But it was us all along."

"See?" He grins at her. "You're getting the hang of this. Told you, you'd have a head for temporal dynamics if you'd apply yourself." There's an enormous crashing noise against the ceiling above their heads, and a thin shower of dirt lands on top of their shoulders.

"Think you could have a head for getting out of cellars anytime soon?" Donna asks. He holds the sonic up, apologetically.

"No setting for wood."

"No, of course not," Donna sighs. "There's a setting that lets you change the aspect ratio at the cinema, and one for making steam in the dryer, but nothing for wood." She digs around in a pile of old hand tools and broken-up crates and comes up with a crowbar. "Lucky for you, I've got settings of my own," she says. "Stand back." They do break out of the cellar- Donna's nothing if not determined- and eventually the bees get around to telling them about their grand designs for the local human population. Which involve nonviolent labor organizing and advanced organic farming techniques. It's somewhat anticlimactic and also oddly touching.

"Oh," he says. 

"WE DID NOT BZZ THINK BZZ YOU COULD BZZ UNDERSTAND US BZZZZ."

"I understand a lot of things," he tells them.

"Except wood," says Donna.

 

 

Donna's still shaking as he sits down across from her, turning her hands over in his own palm and curling her fingers around his for comfort. The bug that expired on her back is still twitching its death-throes on the carpet, so he puts an end-table over it to block it from Donna's view. "Your very own parallel world," he muses. "Not the usual treatment, mind you. Most people, the universe just course-corrects around them, but you," he says, and smiles up at her until she cracks the slightest smile in return. He gives her hands a squeeze before he lets them go. "You're something special, Donna Noble."

"Shut it," she says, but the color's coming back into her cheeks. "You don't think- it wasn't real, was it? Any of it?" He's not sure exactly how truthful he ought to be.

"It was real, while you were there," he says. "But it's over now."

"Are you sure?" Donna looks down at her hands again, now splayed nervously across her kneecaps. "You said time's not a line. That could all still be happening, somewhere, where we can't see it."

"No," he says, firmly. "It was just a bubble, and it popped."

"Good," she says. "Good. Rubbish world, anyway." Her eyes still look hollow, distant. More than a little wary. "You died," she adds. He would have liked very much to have been surprised- even shocked- by that information, but he isn't. Thin lines indeed, between here and not-here. 

"Don't think about it," he says, but then, he knows how well he follows his own advice.

"You died," she repeats, "and I didn't even know you. But she did. She was the only one who knew you, the only one who remembered you at all."

"She?" he prods the Trickster's bug with his toe. "One of the UNIT people?"

"Yeah," says Donna. And then: "No. No, she wasn't UNIT, I don't think. Didn't have a uniform. Just- just a girl," she says, faintly, caught in the memory of it. "Just a blonde girl in a leather jacket." His blood freezes into icicles that drip down his spine. The simplest description evokes a hundred memories, and all of them are dangerous. "She told me to warn you," Donna says, and her face seizes with fear. "She was there when I- when I died, she said- she told me two words." His hands clench and his face gets hot and he can't think, can't quite form speech, can't do anything but stare at her, eyes wide and jaw tight. Not possible. Not possible at all. There is no reason in the world for it, for the horrible sliver of hope that breaks off his heart in cold shards and lodges itself in his throat. Nothing but an animal yearning, an instinct, a wish that won't come out. It wouldn't be her. Couldn't. The universe wouldn't be that good, that kind, that cruel.

"Donna-" he croaks. She looks him straight in the face.

"Bad wolf," she says. 

He gets up and runs away.

When they fling the doors to the TARDIS open and pile inside to the clamor of the cloister bell, he stops short, halfway up the ramp, and Donna thuds into his back. "What the- Doctor," she says, and goes silent, but he doesn't hear her at all. He can't hear anything over the blood thundering in his ears. Rose is standing on the grating, still and quiet, her hands in her jacket pockets. Her hair is pulled back from her forehead, but she looks the same to him. She looks perfect. His hands fly out to the railings to keep upright, and his mouth drops open. She stares out at them- or over them, past them, he notices suddenly, with a jolt. Rose's eyes don't fully land on his. Or anywhere.

"Hello, Doctor," she says. "If you're seeing this, then Donna's made it. Hello Donna," she adds, glancing around.

"Hello yourself," Donna says. Rose's head turns back a degree, and seems to find him again. He knows now, it's only a recording, but it's so perfect- so vivid, so much better than the others were. She looks solid and real. Alive. It's as if she never went away.

"Sorry to surprise you, but this is big. Too big. We've got planets disappearing out of the sky. The walls of the universes are coming down. And I don't mean only Donna's world, it's every world. Pete's world," she says, with a half-smile, which abruptly fades. "Your world. I was able to cross over, just enough to get into that parallel universe, to get to the TARDIS, and that's not supposed to happen, is it? You said it wasn't possible. So I don't know what's causing it, but I know who can stop it. I know you'll figure it out."

"Rose," he says. He is aware that she can't hear him. But he can't help it. Just to say her name again- to look at her, and say her name, and believe that she could understand. "Rose."

"I've recorded everything we know into the TARDIS data core. All our files. Took me long enough," she says, smirking. "Your controls are a mess, you know that? It took half of UNIT to figure out your memory pass-code was _banana_ backwards."

"Better change it," says Donna, at his elbow.

"I don't know if we'll see each other again," says Rose. "I don't know how far the cannon- dimension cannon, hope you're impressed," she adds, grinning, "will let me jump. But I'm going to keep trying. I meant what I said," she tells him. "And I miss you."

"Don't go," he says, like a child, but she leans over the TARDIS console like she's fiddling with a switch and then blinks out completely. He makes a small, hurt noise in the back of his throat without meaning to. Behind him, Donna puts a hand on his shoulder blade. For a long minute that's all that's really holding him up.

"So," Donna says, at last. Very, very gently. "That bell-"

"End of the world," he says.

"You've got a special bell for the end of the world?" Her can feel, rather than see, her smile. "Yeah, of course you do."

 

 

For one brief second he thinks, _I'll get to keep her_. Donna. He dares to dream it: a world of afternoon cocktails and planet-hopping and evenings with her curled up on the other end of the sofa, watching _New New New Strictly Come Dancing_ and mocking the hosts. It rises like a bubble and pops and leaves him slightly dizzy. There is a second where he almost absolutely believes it could be true. A bright spot, a human lifetime of this happiness. Even after everything, after losing it all. He's even lost bloody Davros. At least that clunky metal bastard remembered things as they once were. Piece by piece the world fell away from him- Sarah-Jane and Martha and Jack and his tempestuous factory-fresh double, carted off to Torchwood to make himself useful and to give them both a little space- and then it was just him and Donna and Donna's wonderful expanding mind, spinning around the Omega Nebula, catching their breath. 

"How do you feel?" he asks her. She smiles at him, but when their eyes meet, he can see it- tiny galaxies whirling away, out of control, behind her irises. 

" _Molto bene_ ," she says.

It's like _goodbye_.

 

 

He is stripping off his sodden tie and jacket, dropping them carelessly over the console, when his coat sleeve catches on a lever and a memory sequence starts up. He sighs heavily and fiddles with the buttons, trying to get the beeping to stop, and then he is face-to-face with Rose. Rose's duplicate, her digital echo. The one from before, in that leather jacket, the one who first warned him, but then never appeared again. He forgets to breathe at first, hologram or no hologram. He remembers staring into the comm screen before the fighting started- before Harriet, no, don't- looking at all the beloved faces, and missing hers was like a bruise.

For a long moment, he can't think of anything to say to her.

"I'm sorry," she says, at last. "I hope I made it to you, but I don't know- we're still working on directing the cannon, and it doesn't always want to listen." She looks away, all fond sadness, to the TARDIS console. "So maybe we just missed each other. It feels like I keep doing that." He puts a hand up to her face, watches it pass through her, distorting the playback slightly, like running his hand over a flashlight. Inside the memory cells, she smiles at him. He didn't make it happen, but he can pretend. "Either way, you've probably found them by now," she says, finally. "The videos I made. For you." For him? And then, he understands. Or thinks he does. One more little mystery she's left him. "After those Krillitanes- and after that thing in the black hole- oh, I don't know why," she confesses. "I don't really know. I just thought, if you had them, I'd still be there, in a way. Some part of me would still be here," she looks upward, "kicking around this place. Haunting you," she says, bitterly. "Now who's the dramatist? Anyway. Maybe it's selfish. I don't want you to forget. And I don't want you to be alone. I hope you're not." She frowns. "You'd better not be. I'm not gonna-" she looks down at her feet for an instant, her mouth twisting at the corners, and his hearts skip. When she looks back up, her jaw's set and her eyes are clear. He knows that look. Had it engraved, internally. "I won't say goodbye to you," she tells him. "I never will."

 

XI.

When Amy gets locked inside the ship, and he's busy building Calder-esque mobiles to boost the reception in Craig's spare room, he finds himself making an awful lot of excuses. "This never used to happen," he babbles into the receiver, holding his borrowed phone against one shoulder while he tries to string up baling wire across the remains of the toaster. "Well, when I say never, I mean almost never, and when I say almost never-"

"Get to the point," Amy hisses.

"Having an autopilot sort of really drastically reduces the chances of getting trapped in a auto-temporal loop with your keys in the ignition," he says, in one breath. There's a silence on the other end. "Amy?" he says. "Amy? Amy, are you there? Amy, say something. Give me a yell or one of your dismissive Scottish snorts. Imitate a duck. Amy?"

"An autopilot?" she repeats, thoughtfully. "Like, a computer program that drives for you?"

"Very very like." He gets his hand stuck in a wire loop and winces. "Exactly like."

"How do you get one?"

"You make it," he finds himself saying.

 

 

He starts out with the basics: operational flight matrix in three-dimensional space, getting the ship to fly upright and not run into anything especially sharp. The simplest programs can handle directional altitude and even a fairly sophisticated form of evasive maneuvers. He doesn't feel the need for a projection anymore, not at first. It seems ghoulish. Somehow wrong. Even though he is already starting to have arguments with the console every time the steering goes off-mark, or veers them into what is arguably a better stasis pattern.

"You're ridiculous," he tells the buttons, as they depress themselves automatically, and adjust for his awful angle of descent. "That was a perfectly fine approach, minus the pine forest." He grumbles and slaps the controls with a bit more force than necessary and Amy stares at him.

"Is it going to talk?" she asks. "Like on _Star Trek_?" She grins, pleased with herself, and folds her arms over her knees. "Are you going to say _hello, computer_?"

"No, it most certainly is not going to talk," he says. Three days later, he finds himself asking the empty air above the console just what it thinks it's doing by lowering the buffer resistance, and then he sighs a deep, long, resigned sigh and begins to pick through the audio files. He tries out his own voice- unbearable- and then Amy's, which she rejects totally on grounds of it being too uncanny. Finally he just begins shuffling through the audio settings and voice captures on random, making the rudimentary autopilot say words like _course correction_ and _gravitational pull_ and _explosion imminent_ and _uh-oh_ , and asking Amy to score them on a five-point scale.

In between robotic versions of Jack Harkness saying _activate the auto-descent_ and Charles Dickens shouting _engine fire_ , Rose Tyler's voice suddenly comes out of the speakers, calmly saying _temporal distortion_ , and Amy says, "That one's nice." He could argue, deflect, discourage, take the cowards's route- part of him wants to- but he's tired, and the truth is, he's already spent hundreds of years happily listening to this particular voice telling him he was about to crash-land, even if Amy doesn't know that. 

"I've always thought so," he says, quite honestly, and hits a key to save.

 

 

One day he finds Amy and Rory talking earnestly to the console, heads bent close over it, like schoolchildren over their books. He can hear Rose's voice, low, through the speakers. He lingers in the hallway and listens to them chatter back and forth for a moment, aware of this being a fairly creepy thing to do and not much caring.

"Who were you?" Amy asks. "I mean, where did the voice come from, if you weren't alive?"

"I don't have that information," says Rose. 

"I was plastic for two thousand years," says Rory. There's a gentle, forlorn note in his voice. "Is it like that?"

"No," says Rose, flatly. In the hallway, the Doctor presses a fist against his mouth to keep from laughing. "Can I help you with anything else?"

"It's weird," says Amy, later. "Her just being a voice." He notices the _her_ already, the instant of humanization come and absorbed. He can remember other moments like this one and so he smiles to himself, if a little grimly. "Is that what an autopilot's normally like?"

"They're usually a hologram," he says, and regrets it immediately, because Amy's eyes light up. She was ahead of him already, he sees that now. "Major power drain, holograms," he adds. "Hugely inconvenient to program. Too many variables. You'd need an awful lot of data to make a convincing projection. Voice and movement files, image rendering processors, lots of- things," he says. "Stuff."

"Well," Amy grins, "we've found your _stuff_ already."

"What stuff?"

"A dozen videos of some blonde girl," says Amy, now openly delighted verging on wicked. "You giant space perv." His mouth opens and shuts and nothing useful comes out of it. "Nothing to say for yourself? Making tapes of innocent-"

"I didn't make those," he says, too quickly. And maybe too harshly. He looks away at the console, fiddles with something that doesn't need fiddling with, and all the while he can feel Amy's eyes narrowing at him. "On my honor."

"Who did, then?"

"She did." 

"Ah," says Amy. She looks at him, searches his face, and her own expression softens. "Was she," Amy starts, and right then there's a massive explosion underneath them- probably a welcoming shot from the ship he saw passing by their orbit fifteen minutes ago and then forgot about- and he just about kisses the rattling floor in gratitude. There are more explosions and then a chase and the rescue of some orphaned Kexlar eggs, and then much later still, Amy tells him that she has now watched some of the other videos, especially the last two. And afterwards she asks if they could please stop for some ice cream, and then she says nothing more about it.

 

 

He renders the autopilot anyway; pulls the right files and links together the right probability sequences, stuff he used to read about in the helplessly awful manual, now put into practical use. He ought to linger longest over the quantum mechanics, but he finds himself also mired in the minutiae of possible responses, language strings, emotional ranges and conversational integration, blinking, laughing, crossing of arms. The algorithms for artificial intelligence are incredibly complex, bordering on mystic. He inputs everything he has, every word and gesture, and then he sits back and waits for it to formulate itself and load. He has no idea why he's doing this, what impulses have compelled him to this spot. But he waits. There's a first second when there is nothing there in front of him, and in the next, she is standing on the grates in a jean skirt, with dark lines around her eyes. For a brief, giddy instant he feels like he's barely two hundred years old, just a baby really, stealing a joyride for the first time.

"Hello," she says, and he shuts her off in a panic. By the time he's taken thirteen deep breaths and turned her back on, her expression is somewhat mysterious. "Should we try that again?" his autopilot asks. Her smirk widens and his pulse hammers harder. Did he program this in, or was it waiting there all this time, some raw sense memory in the circuits, waiting to burst forth? A true ghost in the machine? She taps her insubstantial foot. "Or are you going to run into another button?"

"No," he says, breathless. "No buttons."

"Good," says Rose.

 

XII.

He goes through a long phase where he refuses to use the autopilot, decides he doesn't need one to run his life or his ship, that he got along fine without it for a few hundred years, that it's purely an attachment to a previous version of himself. He is not sure whether he actually turns her off, or whether she just willfully declines to appear for more than six months after he makes that grand declaration. He tells most people, imperiously, that it's the former.

"I don't have an off-switch," Rose tells them, when he's not in the room. "I just let him think so." And then they're trapped in a chrono-loop that needs two pilots to trigger the release, and she saves him without being asked and then disappears in a sulk, and he feels like he's been an enormous twat. "For the record," says Rose, "you absolutely were."

She doesn't leave him alone again.

 

 

"Rose," he says to her, when they are sitting in total darkness, waiting for another fuel cell to charge. They nearly all went out when a dalek ship hooked into the TARDIS and tried to lift out his ship's consciousness, but there's no living thing more tenacious than the sentient vortex under that hood. The ship burned out the daleks and almost herself, too, but for the single cell left glowing away in the core. When that one was done charging he used it to power up Rose, and when she was done yelling at him about that being a frivolous waste of limited energy, she helped him to get the grid back online. Now they're sitting side by side on the floor in the faint blue gleam of fifteen power cells. If his foot leaned against hers, it would go straight through it. He looks at her, edges blurring in the dark, warm and solid-seeming like she used to be, like she is somewhere still. "Rose," he says, again, more softly, and she smiles at him. He wonders for the millionth time how she can do that, how she can feel effortlessly, as if she were not a projection, not a series of codes that he knows he built by hand. But then- _I create myself_. He always wondered about that, and now he is sure that he wasn't the only one who left traces in her makeup. Her smile is a thing that is part programming and part pure human girl and part heavenly mechanics, a series of events that he will never really understand. "I love you," he says. He's still not sure who he is talking to, which one, except that it must be all of them, every version, every piece. There is no part of her that he hasn't mourned and adored and marveled at. 

She puts her hand over his and for a second, it doesn't fall.

"I know," she says.

 

XIII.

"Am I really dead?" he asks. He feels around the top of his scalp, gingerly, hoping not to knock out any additional bits of brain. But there's no more splitting pain and pressure, and no blood on his fingers when he pulls his hand back to stare at it. There is an old man leaning over him, with his hands resting on the tops of his knees. He looks mildly irritated. The Doctor gapes at him and finds he can't manage a shred of politeness. "Is this some sort of- final hallucination?" he blurts. "The last gasp of consciousness, perhaps. Synapses firing wildly?"

"Do I look like a synapse?" the man huffs. 

"Well, you wouldn't," says the Doctor.

"Old _gods_ ," says the man, and walks away. For lack of anything better to do- and for the sake of curiosity, the oldest and most demanding god of all as far as he's concerned- the Doctor follows.

 

 

He was on a little moon somewhere past Rigel, helping some colonists with an infestation of sentient fungus, and then of course it'd turned out that the fungus had a point about the whole herbicide deal, and running had turned into negotiating and then naturally back to running again. He remembers all that. And he remembers the distress signal afterwards, an odd thing like an old echo still drumming on, a rattling in the universe's pipes. Rose had been wary but the ship had almost pulled herself apart trying to get at it, follow it, drawn like a magnet, and so he couldn't refuse. It was probably just a leftover from some failed shuttle mission- sad, but not singular- and he'd gone to check it out without really considering just where he was headed. And then- "A black hole," he says, to himself. It's coming back in gasps and glimpses. "There was a black hole. I was on the surface and I looked up and saw it in the sky, opening." He looks at the old man, who is now patiently standing in front of him with his arms crossed. "Black holes don't do that. They don't just- appear, out of nowhere, and they can't just- anyway, there was no time. The TARDIS-" he starts, and then he glances around wildly at the nothingness that seems to surround them, the not-space and the velvet darkness past it. "My TARDIS," he repeats. "My ship. She's not-"

"She's perfectly fine," says the man. He gestures to the left and suddenly the Doctor can see it, faint white lights in the gloom, a humble little glow from the beacon on the top. It's difficult to see or sense the distance. He sprints towards it and he's there much faster than he ought to be, skidding to a halt before the doors, putting his hands out to feel the texture of the wood, the solidity and sturdiness of her. He's still got the key in his pocket, so he pushes inside, and then nearly falls flat on his face. From outside the doors, he can hear the old man chuckling. "She may have redecorated," he says.

"Oh," says the Doctor.

There is no console anymore, no grating, no ramp, no support beams. None of her old skins, all wiped away without a trace. Instead, there's just a round white room with a great ball of light at the center, a little pulsar that seems to inhale and exhale with the regular rhythm of a single heartbeat. It turns slowly, sparking in small flares and glimmering as it rotates. He can feel the light where it touches the skin of his face and neck, the backs of his hands. It makes the small hairs stand up, like a caress. 

"Beautiful things, these ships," says the man, at his elbow. "Wish I'd thought of them first."

"What is this?"

"You don't recognize her?" The old man gives him a look of undisguised scorn, which the Doctor really rather resents. Hasn't he just died and gone to- nowhere, after all? He could use a bit of slack with the mental calculations. "Look closer." So the Doctor leans in and stares into that white light, shimmering blue and yellow in certain moments, now bright gold, like the cloud of a nebula or the halo of a star.

"Blon," he says. "Blon Fel-Fotch Pasameer-Day Slitheen."

"That's not quite what I was expecting you to say, but keep going," says the man.

"She got turned back into an egg," he says. His hands are trembling. "She started over, got a second chance. She looked into the heart of the TARDIS, and the heart of the TARDIS is really-" he stops, stares. 

"Always said you were bright," says the old man.

"But you're- you must be, if we're here, and you're-" the Doctor rambles, flabbergasted. "This is the heart of the TARDIS. The actual heart of the TARDIS. And if we're here, standing here, then this is the heart of the black hole. We're actually inside the black hole. And you- you're you. Aren't you?" The old man scowls, but doesn't object to the train of thought. "Him. You're Omega." The greatest hero of the ancient times, the actual father of time and relative dimension in space, glances over at the Doctor with a face like he's been sucking a lemon.

"Ah," he says. "A dismissive nickname I got when I was twenty-seven. So delighted to hear it again." 

"I'm sorry," the Doctor says. His brain whirls. "This is really the true Eye-"

"Don't call it that," the old man snaps. "Don't say that foolish thing to me. It hasn't actually _brought_ much harmony, that I'm aware of." They stand in silence for a while, watching the bright star turn slow circles before them. He's never seen it before, like this. Staring into the heart of the ship was at best an exercise in regeneration and carried a high probability of setting one's entire consciousness on fire. But if this is really the core of time, it feels- good. Warm, instead of scorching. He wonders if Rose can see this- if Rose still exists, now, in this place, or if she was washed away with the rest of the programming. If she's entered the universe now, like he has. Gone into the dust. He doesn't feel sad, or lonely, at that thought. She must be here after all. He barely feels anything but the warmth and peace of this light. He could lose himself in the glow of this miniature star, the shifting colors, the tendrils of flame that flicker out and die in the air. He's always thought she was beautiful, and now he knows. She is. More than he could have imagined. She is a whole world in herself. 

"I'm really dead, though," says the Doctor, at last. "Aren't I?"

"Do you feel dead?"

"I don't know." He looks down at his hands. "I don't know what I expected. I never was ginger, after all that. Almost a millennium, and not one red hair."

"There's always next time," says Omega.

"Of course," says the Doctor. And then: "Wait, _what_?"

 

 

"You're sure you want to try again?" Omega asks him. They are kneeling on the floor of the TARDIS now, so close to the core that the Doctor can barely see anything but incandescent, searing light. He can't believe he's about to be- turned back into an egg, for lack of a more appropriate metaphor. Omega clears his throat. "There are no guarantees. Of anything. There it is, that's your warning." The Doctor looks at him.

"How many times have we done this?" he asks. "How many times have I come here?"

"Lots," says Omega, which is just infuriating.

"Have I ever turned it down before?"

"Obviously not," says Omega. 

"Is it just- is this just a loop, that I keep repeating? All the same things, and the same choices, over and over and over? Does it ever end differently?"

"Well," says Omega. "There are variables. Trillions of variables. Turning left instead of right," he says. "Meeting someone. Asking a question. Asking it again, a different way." The Doctor feels his hearts skip. 

"If there are people I want to see again," he says, very quietly, "important people, if there's someone- if there's someone I need to see again, is there a chance-"

"There's always a chance," says Omega.

The Doctor closes his eyes.

 

 

I.

He finds Susan in the east wing of the archives, staring at an exhibit on primitive humanoids and wondering aloud about mobile phones.

"What does out of range mean?" she asks him, round-eyed. She is eight years old, growing like a weed- her hair, especially, in a little dark cloud down to her shoulders. "Our communication devices have a standard range of thirteen thousand megaclicks, and if you use a signal booster-"

"Yes, yes," he says, and shuffles her away, down the hall. She rambles on about communication buffers and he doesn't have the heart to say what he's thinking, the sad hurt that aches inside him when he thinks about Susan using the comm panels, sending messages, typing like her human father, sending video calls. Her telepathy is limited, he knows that. It's cloudy, imprecise. She will never be able to speak to her mother's people in quite the way they can speak to one another. He tries not to think about that- about anything beyond this moment- as they pick out souvenirs. They are ambling down the corridor towards the exit when Susan tugs his hand.

"Grandfather," she says. "Look." She points to an antique TARDIS on a plinth. "A Type 40," she breathes, with the eagerness of a true juvenile gearhead. She's been taking apart the atmospheric regulators in the house lately, and relying on him to put them back together. "Isn't it beautiful?" she says, dragging him closer. "I like this one. It's blue. I bet it's still got original coral. Can we get one, grandfather, can we? A TARDIS?" He looks down at her and the words catch in his throat. He doesn't know. He's hardly qualified and she's- well, he knows what his own people are like. They're not in the business of handing out TARDIS keys to just anyone with a case of wanderlust.

"Perhaps," he says. "Someday."

Susan smiles up at him, her hand tight in his.

That night, when she's asleep- fragile and human-looking against her enormous pillows- he shuts off the lamp and puts away the book of technical specifications she's been demanding he read aloud. He shuffles up to the observatory and tries to find his place in his own texts, and can't. Instead, he stares up at the stars beyond the dome, through a sky that's clear as glass. They burn steadily across an unimaginable distance. _Why not_ , he thinks. For the first time, he dares to dream- however briefly and timidly- of a world beyond the academy, beyond ritual and pomp, beyond the rules of time and space and anything, a world where she can be exactly what she wants to be, exactly as she is. Perhaps this is the moment, their moment. Perhaps this is the start. He closes his eyes and thinks of the first lesson, the one that really stuck. He was just a boy looking into the schism, as it turned circles around itself forever, never stopping, always spiraling up out of itself, making a perfect loop until the end of the world. It should have been scary- and it was- but it was also a nameless peace. To know that nothing is ever really over, ever really gone.

 _Everything_ , he thinks, _is a beginning_.


End file.
